How 24 Hours in a Remote Greenland Village Showed Me Its American Spirit
How 24 Hours in a Remote Greenland Village Showed Me Its American Spirit
My conversations with young Greenlanders showed me that they are interested in a deal with the U.S.
As we neared Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, population 508 and home of an outpost of Arktisk Kommando, Danish Arctic Command, everyone on my flight was astonished by the emptiness of it all.
“There’s like… no one here,” one of my travel companions weighed in from the back of the plane.
It was true. We had been flying over Greenland (total population: 57,000) for approximately 25 minutes and had not seen a single house, road, car, or any evidence of human habitation at all.
Kangerlussuaq sits at the end of a 100-mile-long fjord, 31 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was once home to the U.S. Sondrestrom Air Force Base, which closed in 1992. The village contains an airport (at the site of the closed U.S. Air Force base), a restaurant (located in the airport), three gift shops (two of which are in the airport), and a small, Aldi-like grocery store that sells .22 rifles off an open shelf (mercifully, across the street from the airport). Kangerlussuaq now seems to be a shell of its former self.
After we landed and took a short bus ride to the terminal, I was left to wander around the town. I walked a mile east and then back a mile west (inland), and I was struck by not only the remoteness, but also the general sense of abandonment. Large satellite dishes, which had long been a part of the over-the-pole early radar detection system, sat abandoned and decaying in stubborn grass and moss. A garbage dump—really, just a field of junk—contained rusted Caterpillars, luggage carts, and scrap metal. Shipping containers full of food, medical supplies, and other necessities—brought six months of the year when the fjord isn’t packed with ice, a local told me—sat just outside of town to the west, a lifeline for the isolated people during the nearly three months of winter darkness.
The sense of abandonment was confirmed when I talked to the habitants of the Kangerlussuaq. “They don’t really come here,” a dishwasher commented when I asked him about the Danish presence. “Unless they’re sent by the military.” The most exciting recent guest according to several locals I asked: Morgan Freeman, who had visited two weeks prior.
Back in my hotel room—also located in the airport—I slept under the near-midnight sun. This time of year, the sun doesn’t set; it just wanes into a pale gray around 3 a.m. local time.
The next day, I started my day with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and coffee. At breakfast, I spoke with a young man I had seen working the cash register at the restaurant the night before. “You’re here from America?” he asked. When I responded in the affirmative, he put his fist up in the air and said, “Make America Great Again!” with a big, toothy grin.
Caught off-guard, I shook his hand with a wry smile and departed for another hike—this time, off to find some American airplane wreckage from the 1960s.
I hiked down a few miles of dirt road. The only passerby was a dump truck on its way to the junk field. Upon reaching the end of the road, I looked left to a steep incline with deep, muddy puddles, and a warning sign for musk ox. Thinking back with regret to my visit to the grocery store with the .22s, I started up the mountain.
Fifty minutes of huffing and puffing later, a vista opened. Straight ahead of me lay a lake without a name, like most lakes in Greenland. To the west, I could see a faint glimmer of Kangerlussuaq. What I couldn’t see, however, was made up for with sound. I heard the steady rumble of an old propeller plane getting ready to take off from Kangerlussuaq airport—I discovered later it was a training mission for new pilots in the Danish Air Force.
The drone of ancient aircraft in my ears, I started around the lake, searching for any hint of the wreckage. Back in 1968, during a whiteout, three U.S. training jets crashed just miles away from Kangerlussuaq. Mercifully, no men were killed, although one did sustain a broken arm during the crash. I wandered around for some 30 minutes, but could find no plane remnants, aside from a roughly 3×6 piece of scrap metal that could just as easily have been carried over from the junk field by the wind.
Frustrated, but also exhausted from the several inclined miles I’d hiked already, I started back down the mountain.
Greenland is full of potential. As I scrambled over rocks and clinging moss, I thought about the myriad of conversations I’d had in my short time in Kangerlussuaq. In many ways, they mirrored conversations I’d had with friends, neighbors, and people I’ve met all over America, which boiled down to: “If only someone would give us a chance.”
Denmark gives 3.9 million DKK (approximately $615 million) to Greenland every year. This grant alone is 20 percent of GDP and over 50 percent of public spending in Greenland. But private Danish investment in Greenland is minimal. This was a recurring theme in every conversation I had: “The Danish hate us,” “The Danish think we’re dumb and backward,” “The Danish treat us like children,” and so on. It’s not as if Greenland is a worthless wasteland. It’s home to some of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals. Greenland is also geostrategically located within five hours of most of the North Atlantic and hosts some of the best deep-sea ports in the world.
As I returned to Kangerlussuaq, haggard and covered in mosquito bites (as in Alaska, the mosquitos in Greenland are almost the size of Volkswagen Beetles), I stopped back at the airport/restaurant/cafeteria and enjoyed what seemed like the best bowl of spaghetti I’d ever had.
After my carb load, I wandered back over to the counter, where my Greenlandic MAGA compatriot from breakfast now stood.
“Do you have any extra MAGA hats?” he asked, pointing to one of my fellow travelers sporting the red cap known around the world.
Unfortunately, we did not, but as some of the Greenlander’s young friends arrived for lunch, they waxed enthusiastic about their love of the New York real estate giant, reality TV star, and two-time president.
“What do you guys think about becoming a part of America?” one of my colleagues queried.
They replied, “We love America, please, we want to be in America!”
To be honest, though I had heard reports of this attitude from the youths of Greenland, I was gobsmacked by their sincerity and genuine enthusiasm. In the recent Greenlandic election, five of the six political parties (left, right, center, unionist, and anti-unionist) formed a coalition government to box out the second-highest vote-getter—Naleraq, which is the only political party that supports closer alignment with North America than with Europe. A sign of what’s to come, perhaps.
An offer was made to ship some MAGA hats to Greenland, so the boys jotted down their names and a promise was made (and kept).
I’ve studied, lectured, and dreamed of Greenland for almost a decade. What I saw in this little town, on the edge of civilization, that I reflected upon during the flight home was the total rugged American-ness of it all. The harsh terrain, brutal conditions, the struggle to make something of your place—but also the desire for something more and greater.
Maybe Greenland can be America after all.
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